Tubarina
Tubarina is the Shark Princess and daughter to one of the most powerful men in Salacia, the Shark King. She is also cousin to Marcello, brother to Veto and has a pet shark named Gummy. In one view, Tubarina is very ingenious and feisty, but quiet and not much for talking. She disagrees with the common stereotype that sharks are evil and hates it when someone says as such. The only person who can calm her spirits is her father, who is full of pampering and affection for her, which is very different from his attitude on the throne of the Shark Kingdom. In another view, Tubarina has an explosive personality and generally behaves in a very bossy manner, which makes her look very silly because she forgets about her friends and her kind side, which in many cases causes problems for her and her friends. Despite this, she is very intelligent. Depiction Tubarina usually dresses in blue and wears a crown in the shape of a shark. While her hair is not shown in the series itself (leaving its colour up to fan interpretation), Tubarina is revealed to have blonde hair in an illustration from the short story Mothers and Daughters. Character highlights In The Pearl, Tubarina takes the pearl from her father’s sceptre to use in her shell display for school. On the way back home to put the pearl back in the sceptre, however, she and Gummy bump into some coral and the pearl drops down into the Abysmal Kingdom. She goes down to get it, which leads Ester to follow her. With additional help from Polvina, Gummy and Bib, Tubarina manages to retrieve the pearl, but the Shark King hears about this from Miss Marla and the girls are punished with cleaning the courtyard. In The Picture, Polvina and Ester find an unflattering picture of Miss Marla that Tubarina drew, which she shows to everyone in the class. Though she manages to evade Miss Marla’s questioning by submitting her assignment, Tubarina accidentally submits the picture with it. Tubarina discovers this and failing to get it back before Miss Marla leaves, decides to go to her house to retrieve it. After an attempt at using sharks to scare Miss Marla fails, Tubarina decides to sneak into the cottage while Polvina and Ester distract her. When Tubarina is discovered just as Miss Marla is about to read her assignment, Miss Marla thinks that she wants more time to work on her assignment and gives her two more days to do it. Just as they are leaving, however, the picture falls out and Miss Marla sees it, but she believes it to be a picture of Marli and asks Tubarina not to draw silly pictures of others again. When Marcello sabotages Tubarina’s speech in The Silence, making even Polvina and Ester laugh at her, she decides to stay silent towards them. For the next two days, Polvina, Ester and Marcello do everything they can to make her talk, but just as Marcello is about to give up, they realise that they just had to apologise to her in the first place. When Tubarina’s parents and Marcello leave the Shark Palace for a week in Tubarina Almighty, Tubarina is left in charge of the Shark Kingdom. Polvina and Ester are excited about this since it means they will get to play in the Shark Palace for the week, but Tubarina is serious about ruling the kingdom, saying that her father is depending on her. The next day at school, Tubarina has sentries accompanying her everywhere. Polvina and Ester decide to open the secret room in the hope that Tubarina wouldn’t be able to resist having some fun, but Tubarina anticipated this and set a trap for them. After some convincing, Tubarina opens the room and the girls discover that the room contains some of the Shark King’s toys from when he was young. Polvina and Ester use this opportunity to convince Tubarina that she should have fun while she is still young. When her older brother Veto returns home from school in Big Brother, Tubarina is distraught because everyone fusses over him and Veto always asks her for favours. However, when she discovers a letter stating Veto’s intention to drop sport at school and take up art instead, Tubarina uses it to blackmail her brother since their father is sports-mad and he would he angry once he sees the letter. Eventually, Veto gets sick of his sister’s scheme and goes to tell the Shark King about it. As expected, he reacts angrily to it, but when Tubarina backs him up, the Shark King is finally delighted to see his children agree on something and allows Veto to take up art at school. In The Doll, Marli guilts Tubarina into giving away her doll, Bebe, which she does out of impulse. However, she regrets her decision and goes to get Bebe back from the baby who it was given to, much to Polvina and Ester’s displeasure. After bringing Bebe back home, Tubarina has a conflict of conscience and eventually, decides to return Bebe to the baby. Wondering why she has never had a turn at being lunch monitor in Lunch Power, Tubarina decides to put herself next in line for the role. On her first day of being lunch monitor, she gets bored at seeing nobody breaking any rules. After school, she finds a pocket of study room slips and the next day, she begins sending students to the study room for some of the most innocuous offences. Seeing this, Polvina and Ester hatch a plan to give Tubarina all the bossiness she could ever want by having everyone riot so she can send them all to the study room. When Tubarina realises this, she admits that she is bossy and decides to never send anyone to the study room again. In Shark Love, a shark falls in love with Tubarina after she frees it from a rope attached to a broken anchor. On Polvina and Ester’s suggestion, Tubarina tries to reject the shark’s advances, but her attempts fail. They then decide to find a girl shark in the hope that the shark will like her instead. They do so while Gummy distracts the other shark with one of Tubarina’s spare crowns, but their plans backfire, causing the two sharks to encounter each other. The girl shark is trapped in the rope that the other shark was trapped in; the other shark frees her and they fall in love with each other. The shark “breaks up” with Tubarina before leaving with the girl shark. In The Seaweed Potion, Tubarina frees Nip from a drifting net he was trapped in, but when she finds that he is unwilling to let anyone touch him, she asks her father for some advice on how to give Nip his confidence back quickly. The Shark King tells Tubarina of a potion that requires a red seaweed which is only found in one place in all of Salacia and she sets out to get it, only to discover that a barracuda is living in a nearby cave, guarding it. Polvina suggests to Tubarina that she be nice to the barracuda, so for the next few days, Tubarina gives him a bowl of food as she approaches him. Eventually, the barracuda becomes less aggressive towards Tubarina, so she takes some of the seaweed and returns. When she informs her father of this, he reveals that this was so he could teach her a lesson about patience. In The True Princess, Tubarina wants to become a true princess after she reads a princess story to Gummy and he asks her why she isn’t. Knowing that Tubarina won’t stop talking about it, Polvina and Ester decide to give her what she wants in the hope that she will eventually get sick of it. Sure enough, Tubarina gets a dress and a crown like a true princess, but despite finding herself being annoyed at the trumpeting sharks following her, grumpy seahorses pulling her golden carriage, Mr Bernardo’s special lessons and dainty morsels for dinner, these nuisances do not dissuade her. Eventually, when faced with the prospect of having to marry Marcello, her “Prince Charming”, Tubarina gives up on being a true princess. Gallery ''Click here to visit Tubarina's image gallery'' Category:Princesses Category:Females